Having an ancient name still counts for something at Oxford and Cambridge, it appears. Photograph: Redferns/Guardian montage

Celebration time for such Berkeleys, Darcys and Talbots who aspire to an Oxbridge education: new research from the LSE finds that Norman names such as these remain over-represented on the student rolls at Oxford and Cambridge, 1,000 years after they were imported by a conquering elite. No such encouragement, though, for people called Boorman or Ledwell who, the study shows, have failed to reap the benefits of social mobility. Their families, poor 150 years ago, are still likely to be found outside the ranks of the wealthy.

What is not clear is how far this reflects Oxbridge judgments on contenders' ability and potential, and how far a posh name still exerts a pull on those who make the selections. Perhaps would-be Oxbridge students should consider adopting one of the favoured names (Berkeley, Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville, Montgomery, Neville, Pakenham, Percy, Punchard and Talbot) especially if the names they were born with were Boorman, Cholmondeley, Defoe, Delmer, Goodhill, Ledwell, Rowthorn, Sidwells, Tonbridge or Trevellyan, all ancient but hardly famous – and under-represented on the student lists.

Yet the curious thing with this "poor" list is not so much the inclusion of Cholmondeley – in the way of several aristocratic names not pronounced at all as it is spelled, though in this case deriving from nothing more grand than a place in Cheshire – but the fact that most of these families are so few. In an analysis of 1998 surnames, the most common of them, Defoe, accounted for a mere five per million of the UK population. You would not expect to find Oxbridge swarming with them.

Nor should Delmers and Ledwells, or for that matter, Smiths and Joneses, assume that a solid phalanx of Darcys and Percys bars their way to the top of society. Among names at the heart of the British establishment recently, Cameron is a Scottish name and Miliband has even less to do with the Normans, while Clegg, though listed by one authority as derived from a Norman name that means gadfly or horse-fly, is now more often thought to have started as a nickname for a man who looked like a haystack.

It is also the case that many British surnames are nowhere near as old as their owners might like you to think. Many families changed or enhanced their names in the hope of greater kudos or juicy legacies. Daniel Defoe was born Foe, but altered his name to make it sound Norman. Tony Blair would have been Tony Parsons had his father not chosen the name of his adoptive parents. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a Welby only because his father shed the name Weiler. Why, the Queen herself would have been born Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had her family not changed it to Windsor in the first world war. And those denied more hallowed, and grandiose names might also take comfort from the words of Tennyson (who, incidentally, contemplated upgrading his name to Tennyson d'Eyncourt, but thought better of it): "Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood."